What keeps the film watchable through it all is Washington, arguably the last of the classical movie stars, who manages to bring almost every role he plays excitingly to life (even one as dreary as this). The closest they come is the all-mobbed-up officer Masters (David Harbour), who agrees to help McCall, but only after the latter gently persuades him with a combination of garden hose and carbon monoxide. And because Teddy seems to have a bottomless supply of devoted (but ineffectual) minions at his disposal, the longer “The Equalizer” stays onscreen, the more it comes to resemble some endless game of post-Perestroika whack-a-mole.įuqua and Wenk envision Boston as such an irredeemable pit of corruption that they don’t even bother to give McCall one of those honest-cop antagonists who sympathizes with our vigilante hero but still wants him to play by the rules. Csokas is a fine actor, with a purring, privately amused voice that sounds a touch like James Mason’s, but he’s visibly bored playing an accented assassin with ice in his veins and vodka on his breath. Then reinforcement arrives in the form of Teddy (Marton Csokas), right-hand hitman to elaborately tattooed Moscow oligarch Vladimir Pushkin (Vladimir Kulich), who doesn’t take kindly to the ruptures McCall has caused in his international criminal pipeline. (The violence in “The Equalizer” is meant to be more serious and less exuberantly splattery than in a Tarantino movie, but in fact it’s just as over-the-top, and a good deal less thought-provoking.)Īs the body count rises, fleeting details of McCall’s past begin to emerge (cue cameos by Bill Pullman and Melissa Leo as former colleagues at “The Agency”). McCall has done a lot of things in his life he isn’t proud of, he explains in one of the film’s quieter moments, but to judge by the evidence onscreen, he still takes a certain pleasure in watching his victims gasp their last, blood-choked breaths, which Fuqua likewise lingers on for maximum unpleasantness. The scene in which McCall dispenses with a half-dozen Russian heavies in under 20 seconds, establishes the character’s handiness with ordinary household objects (particularly a pair of corkscrews), but it also sets a skull-crushing, eye-gouging ante that the movie can never hope to top - though it certainly tries. The helpful tips about good, clean living abound, but when the retributive violence finally kicks in, it does so with a brutal, sickening thud. That’s doubly true when what we get instead is a protracted setup emphasizing McCall’s camaraderie with his fellow stock boys and cashiers, including a jovial, overweight aspiring security guard (Johnny Skourtis) whom McCall puts through the paces of a vigorous diet and exercise regimen. When a battered Teri ends up in the hospital clinging to life, something long dormant in McCall begins to stir, though by this point we’re already more than 30 minutes into “The Equalizer” - an overly generous assumption of how long the audience for this kind of movie is willing to wait for the ass-whooping to begin. In an odd flourish that at times makes Fuqua’s film feel like a cross between “Death Wish” and “Reading Rainbow,” this McCall is also a passionate bookworm, who spends his long, lonely nights leafing through Hemingway and Cervantes in one of those retro, backlot diners where everybody knows your name - especially Teri ( Chloe Grace Moretz), the gold-hearted Russian hooker with recording-artist dreams, who makes small talk with McCall whenever she isn’t being roughed-up by her thuggish pimp. Although he shares a character name and skill set with his TV predecessor, Washington’s Robert McCall is otherwise, literally and figuratively, an Equalizer of a different color: a childless widower (instead of a divorcee with an estranged son) who takes public transit (rather than tooling around in a sleek black Jaguar) and maintains his anonymity by working as a sales associate at a Home Depot-type superstore (in lieu of advertising his special services in the classified ads).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |